Shailja Patel‘s unique artistry is a provocative global mash-up of genres. Shes a slam poetry champion and star of her award-winning, one-woman play Migritude about the intricate webs of global migration and cultural identity. As an acclaimed poet of South Asian and Kenyan ancestry, through her fearless art she embodies the authentic voices of women, South Asians and Africans who are otherwise seldom heard. For her, the ultimate destination of poetry is justice — too heart-breakingly beautiful to be denied.
Bread and Roses: Time Poverty, Super-Wealth and the Politics of Happiness – Annie Leonard and John de Graaf
At the same time the Great Recession has inflicted enormous pain and suffering, it has also caused people to take a deeper look at what’s really important in our lives. Many are finding that time is not money: time is far more valuable. The acclaimed filmmakers and social entrepreneurs Annie Leonard (The Story of Stuff) and John de Graaf (Seattle Area Happiness Initiative) pop the Big Question: What’s the economy for, anyway? Is it a voracious cycle of perpetual growth and more stuff? Or can we create growth within the natural limits of the planet to produce sufficiency, a high quality of life and real happiness?!
Tears in the Eyes: Dr. Jane Goodall’s Reasons for Hope
The visionary primatologist and conservationist Dr. Jane Goodall revolutionized primatology and helped us realize how close our kinship is with the animal kin-dom. It has been 50 years since Dr. Jane, as she’s affectionately known, began her intensive solitary studies of chimp behavior In Africa’s Gombe National Forest and inspired the world to save the rapidly dwindling populations and their habitats. Today, her compelling vision in action to restore people, animals and planet is delivering real hope.
Beloved Community: Hello, My Other Self | Ilarion “Larry” Merculieff & Guadalupe Avila
In today’s radically shifting world, the name of the game is resilience – the capacity of both human and ecological systems to absorb disturbance, roll with the punches and come up standing. Resilience arises from building community – enduring relationships and networks that hold cultural memory in the same way seeds regenerate a forest after a fire. Indigenous leaders Ilarion “Larry” Merculieff and Guadalupe Avila come from old-growth cultures that have sustained community over centuries and millennia.
Education for Action: Reinventing Everything | David Orr, Anthony Cortese and Jess Rimington
Perhaps the single greatest systems error of human civilization is the illusion that people are somehow separate from nature not subject to the ground rules for the rest of the web of life. As a result, were getting an environmental education the hard way — because when you fight nature, you lose. Join ecoliteracy leaders David Orr and Dr. Anthony Cortese and young educational social entrepreneur Jess Rimington for an inspiring teach-in on how educators and students are creating a living curriculum for an engaged society that’s solving problems while studying them.
From Slavery to Stardust: What Would Healing Look Like?
What’s it like to be in someone else’s skin? What if the color of the skin is different – say, black and white? What might happen when the descendants of a white slave trader and of black people who were enslaved meet? That is the brave and wrenching journey embraced by Thomas DeWolf, whose white ancestors were once the nation’s biggest slave traders, and Belvie Rooks and Dedan Gills, descendants of African people who were enslaved. Together they depict their remarkable journey to discover what healing looks like.
Future Generations Are Screaming: The Clean Energy Climate Challenge | Susan Marshall, John Fogarty, Alec Loorz, and James Hansen
The climate crisis is a crisis of governance and leadership. Will we move rapidly enough to realign our policies, politics and economy to stabilize the climate? Creative and innovative people from all walks of life are stepping forward to address the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. Community organizers Susan Marshall and John Fogarty are taking power local. Youth advocate Alec Loorz is mobilizing young people worldwide for the defining issue of their lives. NASA’s chief climatologist James Hansen says there’s still time.
An Oil Spill Runs Through It: Corporate Power and the Sliming of American Democracy | Jeff Clements, John Bonifaz, and Dr. Riki Ott
Some say the modern environmental movement was born in an oil spill in April 1970. Enraged by the first television images of the massive crude oil spill off the pristine Santa Barbara coast, 20 million Americans took to the streets chanting with one voice: Protect Mother Earth. Constitutional attorneys Jeff Clements and John Bonifaz join with biologist and democracy advocate Dr. Riki Ott to explore new strategies to overcome the relentless fight put up by big oil and big business. Could it mean a 28th Amendment to the Constitution?
Globalocal: The Migration of Grassroots Solutions | Mallika Dutt, Jay Vavra & Shannon Horst
Innovations usually arise locally. If conditions are right, they spread globally. That story is playing out around the world today. In India, human rights activist Mallika Dutt designed an elegant media campaign that successfully interrupts domestic violence live in real time. High school science educator Jay Vavra helped his San Diego students save endangered species in Africa by using simple genetic identification technologies in local African bush meat markets. Nonprofit leader Shannon Horst employs holistic rangeland management techniques to stop the spread of deserts in Africa, the U.S. and worldwide. What’s spreading fastest is hope.
Upscaling Goodness: Treehuggers, Earth Acupuncture and Community Forests | Andy Lipkis (Podcast)
Los Angeles as a lighthouse of environmental restoration? You bet. After 40 years of increasingly connected neighborhood actions restoring the landscape of the City of Angels, Andy Lipkis and TreePeople, the legendary group he founded, are ready to scale up. After catalyzing the first major urban Department of the Watershed, TreePeople and friends are motivating millions of Angelenos to grow environmental and community interconnectedness across the entire L.A. watershed. Next destination: all Southern California.
Women and Power: “Power Over” or “Power To”? | Gloria Feldt and Reinette Senum
The future belongs to women. Around the world, women are inspiring each other to envision a world where women lead, but quite differently. Women are spontaneously redefining power and shaping it in novel ways. According to social justice advocate Gloria Feldt and community advocate Reinette Senum, leadership begins inside with power to rather than power over. How is the leadership of women benefitting us all?
Radical Patriotism: Growing Growers and Seeding Leaders for a Real Food Future
What happens when green turns to grey? Fewer than 5 percent of 2 million American farmers are under 45 years old. Bucking that trend is the next generation of unstoppable young farmers Severine von Tscharner Fleming, Tyler Webb, and Sarita Role Schaffer, along with renowned urban food innovator Nikki Henderson and real food advocate Amin Steele. With dirt under their nails and laptops at their fingertips, they’re reinventing a radical patriotism founded in a return to local agriculture and community. It runs on clean energy and knows how to move markets. It seeks greater self-sufficiency, self-determination and food justice, and the checkout line is the pulpit.